[Martin Curtis]

[Mark Suszko] “But your clients say: “Video is EASY: you just push a button and there it is! How hard can it BE?”
“
And then I make one with them (and I love to involve them in the process 🙂 ) and they discover how time-consuming it is. They all have that Zen moment – a look somewhere between enlightenment and exhaustion. And I generally do short ones. “A minute takes an hour to shoot and 10 hours to edit”. Said it over and over. I’ve generally worked out that 10 minute interviews/pieces to camera can be shot in an hour and edited in a day. One day I’ll make a video of a handful of satisfied clients explaining the process and pop it on the intranet.

[Martin Curtis]

[John Pale] “The manual is online at Apple.com”

Here.

[Martin Curtis]

Common request for me: large organisation, lots of internal presentations (and, because it’s a hospital, lots of presentations of people’s internals…) and someone wants to put in a clip they “found” on YouTube and can’t understand why they can’t download it.

Once I confirm that the presentation will not be leaving our 52 walls (to minimise my exposure to lawyers), here’s how I do it:

• I use Firefox on my PC (which I managed to install while IT wasn’t looking) and a YouTube clip downloader. Here’s an example of one.
• Take the clip to my Mac
• On my Mac I have FCP, Perian (very important if the clip is in FLV format) and MPEG Streamclip
• Open the clip in MPEG Streamclip (which really needs a shorter name) and export it in the same format as my sequence. Since I’m a DV kind of guy, I use DV Movs.
• Bring in to FCP and work any required magic
• Export as QT ref movie
• Open that in MPS, and convert to WMV for the boz- I mean “clients” using PCs and PowerPoint.
• Confirm that their laptop isn’t a Dell with a stupid graphics display bug that our IT department still hasn’t fixed
• Explain a million times how to put WMVs into PPT and how to successfully move a presentation with video from one PC to another.

[Martin Curtis]

[Walter Soyka] “I’d like to see a unified data model.
…Let FCP handle the editorial, let Color handle the color, and let Soundtrack handle the audio — but there should be a database working in the background to manage the same media and the same sequences across the entire suite. An editorial change in FCP should be reflected in Color without reconform, because FCP and Color should be fundamentally working on the same sequence.”

I agree. The project should be the central point around which everything else revolves. You have the project manager. Time to edit: in come editing (FCP) tools). Time for motion graphics on a portion: in comes Motion tools. etc. I can see the different tools moving in and out like screens in spaces while a clip window stays central.

I say this as someone who does not own a bazillion dollar company nor have any programming skills. Or that many editing skills.

[Martin Curtis]

[Chris Blair] “I think part of the “craze” you’re seeing with corporate people using it is they think getting video of the client up on YouTube or Facebook trumps projecting a good image with high quality and meaningful content.”

That’s because they are seeing really popular Youtube videos that have been shot with Flip-type cameras. They are forgetting that with good/funny content, people will forgive the shaky video and tinny sound and that there’s a million other videos just like that on YT that no-one is watching.

Content is king.

If your content isn’t that compelling (because it’s an advertisement) anything that distracts (shaky, tinny) from the key message will dilute that message even further.

My local AV supplier videoed me with a Flip camera for their website. I told them they’re idiots because they have a studio with $10 000 Sony cameras. They wanted to be hip. And they sell Flips, too.

[Martin Curtis]

Hello Sallys.

[Martin Curtis]

I used to use iMovie to capture while transitioning to FCP. The day I learned Log and Capture in FCP is the day I stopped using iMovie.

As others have alluded to, iMovie capture is good for iMovie, but not much else.

If you are capturing DV, it creates wonky DV files. When you bring them into FCP, you have to render the audio.

If you are capturing AVCHD, iMovie will capture as Apple Intermediate Codec which uses a 4:2:0 colour space, and captures 1920 x 1080 as 1440 x 1080.

About the only reason I can think of using iMovie is because of its “Project Library” feature.

[Martin Curtis]

My employer is the largest employer in the state, some 75 000 people. Our standard PCs (which run XP and are using Office 2003) will not play .movs (or even DVDs…) but they do have Flash 10.x installed which is the ONLY way to get them to play anything h.264 (but only when embedded in a web page). There was a time in the not-too-distant past when they wouldn’t play WMV9 files.

Before they upgraded Flash and WMP, I used to create MPEG1 files with Visual Hub to put on the intranet.

Old and ratty it may be, but MPEG 1 still has a place. Thanks for reminding me of that, David.

Know thy target.

[Martin Curtis]

How did you import the files? It nearly sounds like you have the files on your hard drive and then create a sequence. If the sequence codec settings are different from the codec your files actually use, you will have to do lots of rendering.

Create a project. Set the sequence settings. Use Log and Transfer to bring files from you camera into FCP. The file codec will match your sequence codec.

https://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/professionalformatsandworkflows/index.html#chapter=6%26section=2%26tasks=true
https://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/usermanual/#chapter=22%26section=0

[Martin Curtis]

Voltaic is a Mac or PC application that can transcode AVCHD files, but the question is what would you transcode them to? Voltaic on the Mac can transcode to ProRes (if you have that codec installed) but that’s not an option for the PC version. It’d be a shame to transcode the original files to a lossy format (that you have the codec for) as MOVs only to have the Mac guys transcode again to, say, ProRes MOVs It does have a demo version so give it a whirl.

Clipwrap is nifty because it doesn’t have to transcode, but it can wrap AVCHD in a MOV wrapper, thus opening up the files to use by Quicktime-based applications:

• .MTS file (AVCHD codec) -> .MOV file (AVCHD codec) (performed by Clipwrap with no recompression)
• .MOV file (AVCHD codec)-> .MOV (ProRes codec) performed by FCP or Compressor etc.

Using Clipwrap, I can keep the original small AVCHD files in a MOV wrapper and convert at any time.

Can you bring a .MTS into Vegas and export straight into a .MOV without transcoding? Explain to the recipients that they’re receiving an AVCHD file that will need to be converted to ProRes and they should be OK with that. Be easier if they bought ClipWrap themselves 🙂